Hanne Ørstavik

This is a slim, 120 page novella about a young divorced mother and her young son who have recently moved to a new town. It's the night before the boy's 9th birthday and they spend the evening into late night apart, out in the town. The mother, Vibeke, has gone out to the library and then meets an attractive man who she stays out with until late at night. Meanwhile the son, Jon has also gone out and has interactions of his own. It's clear that things are moving towards a dramatic conclusion, but I was hopeful that the conclusion would not be sad. I won't say if I was right or not.

The writing style is really interesting. The prose is sparse and to the point and the book shifts between the mother and the son's POV with no warning - no page breaks or anything. So you have to use context sometimes to realize you've shifted to being with a different character.

I really liked this. I have another of Orstavik's books on my shelf, and I'm looking forward to reading it.… (mais)

Johanne wakes up to find herself locked in her bedroom, in the tiny Oslo flat which she shares with her mother Unni. She soon realizes that Unni must have wanted to stop her from going to the US with her new (first?) boyfriend, Ivar, whom she met at the canteen of the college where she studies psychology.

Over the course of the book, Johanne tells us something about her world. She doesn't tell us everything, though, and we cannot really trust what she does let us know. In fact, it doesn't take long for us to notice that although she leads a more-or-less normal life, Johanne has her psychological hang-ups and disturbing mood swings. In particular, happy-clappy spiritual visions tend to alternate with shocking, violent thoughts. These issues might be a result of the oppressive presence of Unni who, in turn, appears to have problems with her own mother. In this novella it seems that, to paraphrase Larkin, "woman hands on misery to woman".

Ørstavik’s work had been translated into eighteen languages but this was her first work to be translated into English (by Deborah Dawkin), thanks to the innovative Peirene Press. It is a brilliant, clever psychological/character study but not necessarily an "entertaining" book in the usual sense of the word. I confess I found it a challenging, occasionally painful read.… (mais)

I Love You
Review of the And Other Stories paperback (2022) translated by Martin Aitken from the Norwegian language original "Ti amo" (2020).

Ti Amo (Italian: I Love You) is Norwegian author Hanne Ørstavik's fictionalized non-fiction novel about her life with Italian author, publisher and translator Luigi Spagnol (1961-2020) written while he was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer prior to his death. I call it fictionalized as there are aspects which likely are different from the real-life events e.g. in Ti Amo the husband (who isn't named) is writing a science fiction novel on his smartphone prior to his death, whereas Ørstavik's Norwegian Wikipedia page says that Spagnol was translating her novel Roman. Milano (2019) into Italian. The real-life Spagnol could have been doing both of course.

See photograph at https://www.dagbladet.no/images/72617189.jpg?imageId=72617189&x=0&y=7.04...
Author Hanne Ørstavik with her husband Luigi Spagnol prior to his death in 2020. Image sourced from the online pages of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

Although the fatal conclusion is known in advance, the book is still a beautiful evocation of the bond between the couple. It portrays their earlier happier life in flashbacks and is a memorial to their mutual affection. Ørstavik writes that it was a book that she had to write before she could move on in her life and other writing. This is I think the 4th book of Ørstavik in English translation, and several of them have also been translated by Martin Aitken.

I read Ti Amo through the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month subscription for which it was the November 2022 selection.… (mais)

This is an intense, introspective, and even claustrophobic work, and evidently an autobiographical one. For Archipelago Books, its publisher, it is an “uncategorized” title—not definitively fiction or autobiography. The subject matter is painful. In it the unnamed narrator, a writer, addresses her sensitive, intelligent husband (also unnamed)—a successful publisher who once aspired to be an artist. He is dying of pancreatic cancer.

Their relationship has not been a long one—four years. They married only the previous summer, in August 2019. After his diagnosis, the narrator’s partner wanted to affirm their love in a formal union. In this man, the writer had, for the first time, found home and a sense of belonging. She had also moved from Oslo to Milan. One of the questions for her now is how she will continue without him. Her main preoccupation, however, is with her husband’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge that he is dying. The writer has always believed herself to be a person committed to the truth—facing it head-on—yet she finds she cannot broach the subject with him. His doctors also do not. Their philosophy is that if the patient is not asking questions, they do not supply information that could deprive him of hope. The oncologist comments that the narrator too has not been seeking clarification.

For close to two years, since her partner began to experience concerning symptoms, the writer has been unable to write. She rereads a notebook entry from months before in which she observed: “It’s as if the writing in me has withdrawn — tactfully, almost — not wanting to bother me in these times.” After a trip to a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, she feels a return of life energy and purpose, recognizing that the novel she has begun—this novel, Ti Amo, now before the reader—“is the life I live on the inside and it fetches things up from different times and separate layers that I often don’t realize need to meet, so that I can be with them, the way you might sit on the edge of a bed in the evening and hold the hand of a child, just being there, for the novel possesses an insight so much deeper than my own, and because it’s in touch with this very life force itself, it knows so much better than I do where the wave of each new novel is going to take me. But since . . . you [the husband] became ill, it’s been completely impossible for me to write . . . your coming meant that I moved forward, I came home. But now you’re going to die, you, who allowed me at last to find that home with you, and how am I going to move forward from that, here and now?”

During the pandemic, I read a short piece by a retired doctor whose wife had recently died (not from the virus). He noted that during the course of her final illness, she had not wanted to speak about her death. In the end she thanked him for “letting her go gently.” It occurs to me that people have their own way of leaving this life. It can be hard work to let go. Talking about “the truth” is not the path for everyone. You can know things in your own time and your own way.… (mais)